


The Sea in a Chasm

by orphan_account



Series: Sussex [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Asexual Relationship, Asexual Sherlock, F/M, Humor, M/M, Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:04:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sherlock decides to retire to Sussex, John decides to find out who he is without Sherlock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. October

**Author's Note:**

> The title, “The Sea In A Chasm,” is taken from Marianne Moore’s poem, “What Are Years?”
> 
> Ch. 1: The client who comes to 221B is a nod to Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter.”
> 
> Ch. 2: John’s misfortunes in Farnham and Sherlock’s taking a gun on his search for a criminal are adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist.” In that story, Sherlock does indeed tell John that he does “remarkably badly.”
> 
> Sherlock waking John up and shoving him onto a train in the chilly wee smalls are adapated from Doyle’s short story, “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” as is the exchange in which Sherlock gripes about John’s way of writing up his cases/John asks why he doesn’t just write them up himself.
> 
> Sherlock’s disappearance, the parade of questionable characters asking for him under one of his false names, and the injuries he returns with after his absence are adapted from Doyle’s story, “Black Peter.”
> 
> Sherlock stealing John’s debit card and stashing it in his desk is a nod to Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.” 
> 
> Ch. 5: The case and its fallout are adapted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.”

The news of Sherlock’s impending retirement hits John like a physical blow. He looks around for something reassuring to stare at, something comforting, but the flat seems suddenly foreign and he feels that he is falling, falling. His breakfast has gone heavy in his stomach.

“To East Sussex, in six months,” Sherlock says, settling into his armchair with a trace of a smile. “Previous owners kept an apiary, it seems. Come with me.”

John wraps his hands around his teacup, focusing on the intensity of the too-hot china against his palms. “Bit early for that, isn’t it? For retirement?” John asks, hoping he sounds casual.

“I’m forty-eight, John, and I need hardly remind you that I’ve not been careful with myself. My ability to keep pace with the physical part of the work is no longer adequate, and I refuse to descend into mediocrity,” Sherlock says. He seems amused, which John can make no sense of.

John puts down his cup and pulls the blanket on the back of his chair into his lap, clutching fistfuls of its worn fabric. “Right,” he manages, “Okay. Can… can you even afford that? Not working for that long?”

Sherlock favors him with a withering stare. “Despite your impression that I am financially impaired, I have in fact arranged accounts for each of us that, unless we should develop a fondness for crashing Mazaratis into Hermès boutiques, will be more than sufficient for our needs. Really, John, give me some credit.”

John swallows. John does not like change, John wants what he already has, and John did not wake up this morning hoping to find himself out of a job and looking at real estate in East bloody Sussex. “If we did that,” he starts, not sure what he’s going to say, “Retired together. That would, ah, that would say something about us. Wouldn’t it?”

“Something you don’t think is true?” Sherlock asks, one eyebrow forming a quizzical arch. He pauses, scrutinizing John’s face. “Ah. Something you’re afraid is true. Disappointing.”

“This isn’t who I expected to be,” John says, reaching for his cup. It’s lukewarm. He takes a sip he doesn’t taste.

“And you fear you’re running low on time to live up to your expectations,” Sherlock supplies in a monotone that hurts John worse than Sherlock’s outbursts ever have.

John stares out the window over Sherlock’s shoulder. Grey sky. Unremarkable. Unhelpful. “I just—to be honest, Sherlock, I didn’t think you’d ever retire. I thought you’d work yourself into an early grave, and then I’d—”

“Finally have the chance to live your real life with some woman,” Sherlock says, his voice still flat.

“No. No,” John says, “I don’t… I don’t know what I would do. I don’t know who I am without you.”

Sherlock rises and takes the few steps to the kitchen chair that he’s buried under his outdoor things. He slides on his coat, then his scarf, each movement restrained (theatrical, John thinks, let’s not mince words, the man is starring in the play of his own life and he knows it). His coattail snags the umbrella stand on the way out, upsetting it, but he doesn’t pause. John hears him descend the staircase, wait, and run back up, taking the steps two at a time. He bursts through the doorway and jams his hands into his pockets.

“I know who I am without you,” Sherlock says, his intensity saturating his words, “I’m _half_. How can you not…” He presses his lips together and stares at the parquet. “Selfish,” he mutters, and turns away, closing the door behind him.

John stares at the umbrellas scattered across the entryway. He puts down his teacup. He isn’t sure which is worse: that Sherlock, of all people, has called him selfish, or that Sherlock is right.

* 

Greg looks contented, soft around the edges and domestic in ways John would not have imagined possible during Greg’s days with the Met. Over the years, staying home to raise two girls has taken some of the swagger out of him; while John imagines that a certain amount of self-assurance is built into Greg’s DNA, the man sitting across the scratched-up pub table from him now wouldn’t strut outside a country inn in sunglasses. He has nothing to prove, and it seems to suit him.

John sips at what he hopes will be his first of many pints and asks, “How’s tricks?”

“Molly’s great, it’s her first month as Head of Pathology,” Greg says with a smile.

“That’s fantastic!” John says, and means it; Molly, for all her awkwardness, has the right mix of warmth and pragmatism to handle management.

“She’s just over the moon about it, we all are. Girls are fine, holy terrors as usual.”

“Good to hear. Jude still doing Debate?”

“She is. Turning her more outspoken than ever. Why they teach the kids how to argue, I ask you…” Greg shakes his head ruefully. “Tabba’s going out for football, which is quite the mystery since she’s never done sport a day in her life, but who knows.” He shrugs. “How’s by you?”

“Oh, fine. Sherlock’s retiring,” John says, picking at the edges of the cardboard coaster under his glass. He’s glad that Greg chose a place that keeps the telly volume down; for the last few years, he’s found it hard to follow conversation when there’s much background noise. He’s so grateful for the quiet that he’s willing to excuse the pervasive smell of spilled drinks and stale pretzels and the alarmingly sticky floor.

“Aw, good on him. Didn’t think he’d do it before the work killed him.”

“Me neither. Says he’s going out to Sussex to keep bees—cor, is it always this dark in here?” John grumbles. Every time the door opens, it lets in a stab of light that hurts his eyes.

“Sure is, mate. Cops like dives, you shoulda known we’d end up here when you let me pick,” Greg teases, then turns thoughtful. “He does realize that Sussex isn’t in London, right?”

“Far as I know.”

“Huh. Never would’ve thought he’d leave the city.”

John sighs. “He’s asked me to come with him.”

“Obviously,” Greg chuckles. “Imagine him out there without you—half his neighbors’d hate him, and the other half’d try to kill him. When’s the big move?”

“Greg, I’m not going.”

“What? Why not?”

_I shot a man to death for him on our first case because I’ve put him first since the day we met,_ John thinks, but it seems imprudent to mention that to Greg. “Dunno what the hell I’d do in Sussex. Seems pointless, really. Had a bit of a row about it with Sherlock this morning.”

“John, look, me and Molly’ve figured for ages that you two were—I mean, you just don’t work without each other.”

John presses his lips together. “Yeah. Bit unhealthy, that.”

“Maybe for normal people, but he’s nowhere near normal. Usual rules don’t apply,” Greg concludes, finishing the last of his pint.

“Look, Greg, I’m fifty-three, right, and so far what I’ve got to show for it is a bunch of scar tissue and a best friend who thinks nothing of leaving human remains in our kitchen. Career derailed ages ago, no real relationships since Mary. I don’t even own any furniture, for God’s sake. If Sherlock threw me out tomorrow—”

“Sherlock would never—,” Greg interrupts.

“If Sherlock threw me out tomorrow,” John repeats, “I’d have nothing.”

Greg reflects for a moment, then says, “You’ve got your blog.”

“Which is about Sherlock,” John counters.

Greg scowls. “I think we could use another round,” he decides.

When they’ve finished their drinks, they’re still not done talking (Greg could complain about his ex-wife straight through the Second Coming, John reflects), so Greg invites John back to his flat. The space is cosy and disorganized, the loose ends of four busy lives trailing over every piece of furniture. It smells of the nose-stinging body sprays favoured by teenaged girls.

Molly is sitting on the living room sofa, staring at her iPad (a website that consists entirely of photographs of cats in sweaters, if John’s surreptitious glance over her shoulder has the right of it). She must have just gotten home from one of her weekend shifts; she’s still in a smart blouse and slacks, her stockinged feet resting on the coffee table next to a glass of white wine.

“John!” she says, surprised. She looks furtive as she turns off the iPad.

“Hello, Molly. Congrats on making Head,” John says. He takes a seat in the armchair as Greg sits next to Molly and puts an arm around her.

“Thanks,” Molly blushes. “Didn’t expect to see you here. I just got back from coffee with Sherlock, I met up with him after work.”

John rounds on Greg. “Wait, did you know she was out with Sherlock?”

Greg looks like he’s swallowed something uncomfortable. “Didn’t seem like my place…” He cringes. “Sorry.”

“I hate it when you two fight,” Molly says, inexplicably sounding like she’s apologizing. “I hope you can work it out soon.” She pauses, her face nervous, then blurts out, “He’ll really be very crushed if you don’t go, Jo—oh, I wasn’t supposed to—well, I’m hardly telling you anything you don’t already know, am I, so he’d hardly have reason to—I should change,” she stammers, reddening as she hurries from the room.

“Still thick as thieves, those two, ever since—well,” Greg complains.

“Jealous?” John asks.

Greg wrinkles his nose. “What, of Sherlock? Pff. He’s weird-looking, innee, and he’s stuck living with you.”

John feels like he probably shouldn’t laugh, but he does.

There’s a ruckus at the front door. A few moments later, the twins burst through from the foyer, followed by a woman in a gray raincoat whom John finds familiar, but he can’t place her.

“Hi, Dr. Watson,” Jude calls out.

“Hullo,” Tabba adds, waving as both girls tromp into the kitchen. The familiar woman stays by the foyer entrance.

John waves back. “Hullo Jude, hullo Tabba.” Their names are Judith and Tabitha, properly, but no one calls them by their full names outside of school. They are pale and freckled and have, John thinks with a pang of sympathy, entered the tragically awkward phase of early teen development.

“How was the movie?” Greg asks.

“Hilarious,” Tabba says, at the same time Jude groans, “Wretched.”

“Well, I thought it was hilariously bad, but that made me laugh, so I loved it,” Tabba grins.

“You’ll have to help us pick out different films from now on,” the familiar woman tells them. “Your mum likes them, but I think that maybe romantic comedies aren’t your style.”

“Not really, Dr. Miller, but thanks for taking us,” Tabba says.

“Yeah, thanks for not ditching us, like our darling mum did. Mr. Holmes showed up and she went off with him instead,” Jude complains.

“Maybe they’re having an affair,” Tabba speculates, sounding at once scandalized and hopeful.

“You’re mental,” Jude scoffs, “Mum wouldn’t do that to Dad, and anyway no one would have an affair with him. He’s old, and mean, and if he was trying to put the moves on Mum he did it all wrong.”

Tabba holds one arm stiffly in front of her as though offering an invisible packet. “’I brought crisssps!’,” she drones, doing such an unmistakable imitation of Sherlock that John doesn’t know whether to applaud Tabba or defend Sherlock. The twins giggle.

The familiar woman (Dr. Miller, apparently) makes eye contact with him. Two things strike him: one, that he’s seen her around the Met, and two, that he finds her attractive to such a degree that he may actually forget how to compose a sentence if he tries to chat her up. She has dark eyes and dark skin and killer, just killer cheekbones, and yep, derp, there goes his coherence. If he gets a chance to flirt with her, he’s going to have to coast on charm and hope she doesn’t think him too old or too frumpy. She’s sharply dressed, and he’s… well, he’s been meaning to replace this jumper, but he’s just so used to it.

“Jude! Tabba! Out,” Greg roars. He shakes his head as the girls skitter into their bedroom. “Honestly,” he mourns, “it’s like they turn thirteen and their manners just vanish. Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” John assures him, “hardly the worst beating Sherlock’s taken.” He’s always been fond of the twins; Tabba is a born entertainer, and Jude has been calling Sherlock out on his poor behavior since she was five (“That’s my drawing! Don’t write on it, get your own paper!”), which is more than enough to put them in his good books.

“I’ll have to have a chat with them about neuroatypicals,” Dr. Miller frets. “It wasn’t very sensitive of them to make fun of Sherlock like that.”

Surprised, John asks, “You’ve met Sherlock? Before today?”

“I’ve seen him around. Heard the two of you chatting as we passed in the hall a few times—well, mostly he was talking at you,” she says. John’s confusion must show on his face, because she adds, “I’m a psychiatrist, I do some consulting with the Met. Dr. Cynthia Miller.”

“Dr. John Watson,” John says.

“Nice to formally meet you,” she replies with a gracious smile. “I have to say, your boyfriend is quite the character.”

John shakes his head. “Sherlock is not my boyfriend.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I should have known,” she apologizes, “you’ve been together so long—do you prefer ‘husband’? ‘Partner’?”

“Neither,” John grimaces, “we’re friends. Just friends.”

“Right. Well, I hope you get sorted soon,” she says. “Life’s too short.” She looks at Greg. “I have to run. Tell Molly I’ll call her later, would you please?” Greg nods.

“Mind if I walk out with you?” John asks.

Cynthia shakes her head. “Not a bit. I’ll just step out for a smoke while you get ready.”

“Great,” John agrees.

As soon as Cynthia leaves, Greg says, “Good luck, mate.”

John gets out of the armchair, mostly suppressing his usual hmph of exertion. “Sorry, what?”

“She thinks you’re gay, and she’s out of your league. Good luck asking her out,” Greg smirks.

“Go to hell,” John says lazily. “See you for the Arsenal match next week?”

“’Course.”

“’Night.”

“’Night.”

Between the time that John vanishes into the foyer to put on his coat and the time that he shuts the front door behind him, he hears Molly head into the kitchen and the girls emerge from their room. He overhears comments from:

Jude, incredulous: “Oh my God, Mum, Dr. Watson is the biggest closet case ever. I seriously don’t know why he bothers with dating. Those poor women.”

Tabba, giggling: “Mr. Holmes is drowning his sorrows in crisssps!”

Greg, exasperated: “Girls! You’ve no business talking about them like that, and even if you had, Dr. Watson is still here!”

Jude, mortified: “Oh, shit!”

Molly, mortified: “Jude!”

Tabba, puckish: “Mum!”

Greg, irritated: “Tabba!”

Tabba, irrepressible: “Crisssps!”

When John meets Cynthia on the front porch, he asks her if she could possibly spare him a cigarette, and then he asks her for her mobile number. He gets both.

*

John comes home to a haze of cigarette smoke. He’s complained for years about Sherlock shedding his nicotine patches like so many molted feathers, but John is incredulous when he sees the full, smouldering ashtray on the coffee table.

“Were you seriously smoking?” John asks, hanging up his jacket. “In the flat?”

Sherlock is stretched along the length of the sofa in a grey dress shirt and black trousers, hands folded at his waist, looking even more cadaverous than usual. “I wanted a cigarette and I didn’t want to go outside,” he says.

“You wanted a pack, from the smell of it,” John snipes.

Sherlock keeps his eyes on the ceiling as he asks, “Are you going to be self-righteous—and hypocritical, might I add—or are you going to answer the door?”

“Why would I—”

The buzzer sounds from downstairs.

By the time the client (hapless bloke, rugby player, reminds John of many of his former teammates) leaves, John has decided not to fight with Sherlock about the smoking. Sherlock is too stubborn, and John is too, too tired.

Sherlock resumes his place on the sofa. “I have been informed that my earlier approach was not optimal,” he informs the ceiling after a few silent minutes have crawled past.

“I’m sorry, what?” John asks from his armchair. He’s made himself a nest of blankets and tea-with-brandy and a plate of biscuits, and more than anything, he wants to enjoy them and lose himself in the Wilkie Collins novel he picked up at a used bookstore ages ago but has never gotten around to reading. Probably because Sherlock interrupts him, he reflects, not without bitterness.

“It has come to my attention that—earlier. About Sussex. I should have asked you differently,” Sherlock says.

John demolishes a shortbread. “First off, you didn’t ask me, you told me to come with you. Not the same. And ‘differently’?”

“My source indicated—”

“Sherlock, for Christ’s sake, I know you’re talking about Molly,” John snaps.

Sherlock grimaces. “Molly told me that I was ‘unnecessarily antagonistic’,” he says, mimicking Molly’s delivery. “She said that I should ‘try being vulnerable’.”

“Okay, I’m listening,” says John, reaching for a custard cream. He makes a mental note to congratulate Molly.

Sherlock takes a deep breath. “I know that—that you don’t picture living with me if we aren’t working. Because it’s not what you thought you would have. It’s not what I thought I would have either, John, I thought I would be dead by now, but I do picture it. I do want life, with you.”

John blinks. “Sherlock, that is—did you plan to say that?”

“A bit,” Sherlock admits. “I didn’t trust myself to make it up as I went along.”

“It’s wonderful,” says John.

Sherlock finally turns his face to John’s. He looks pleased. “Will you come?”

John swallows a gulp of tea. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” Sherlock asks in his very best monotone, and John hates that he can see, actually see, Sherlock collapsing into himself.

“I just—” John shakes his head and starts over. “My life should be more than a response to yours.”

Sherlock nods.

Sherlock bites his lower lip.

Sherlock stands and picks up his violin.

Two hours later, John knows that he should go to bed, that he’ll spend tomorrow feeling off-kilter if he doesn’t get enough sleep, but he doesn’t want to leave the room. Neither he nor Sherlock have said a word. Sherlock is playing, and John wants to, feels that he is supposed to, listen. John doesn’t know much about music (he has managed to learn nothing but a few bits of Italian that he considers unpronounceable), but he loves it when Sherlock plays. Tonight, the melodies hurt his chest, pain him in ways he does not know, has never known, how to describe. It’s breathtaking.

Sherlock stops. He holds the bow over the strings, trembling, then lets his arms hang heavy at his sides. The light from the lamp is gentle and golden over his dejected lines, his crumpled shirt. His sleeves are rolled to his elbows, his jaw flushed where he had pressed it against the chin rest. Damp silver curls cling to his temples.

Abruptly, Sherlock’s whole body tenses, his face falling in. By the time that John consciously recognizes that expression as the prelude to violence, he is already on his feet. He stares in horror as Sherlock dashes the violin against the wall, again, again, then throws open the window and flings the wreckage through it. He repeats the process with the bow, then storms into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

Cold air seeps in. John waits for his adrenaline surge to dissipate before he crosses the room to close the window, muffling the noise from the street. His fight-or-flight response isn’t finished: he is still shaking, still breathing too fast. He shifts against the sill, then feels a bright stab of pain and lifts his right foot. His sock is bloody. He peels it off. Splinters of Sherlock’s violin are lodged in his skin.

The silence is terrible.


	2. November

_I’m sorry._  
 _I know. SH_  
 _I’ll visit, when you go._  
 _I look forward to it. SH_  
 _You’re hurt._  
 _Obviously. SH_  
 _I am sorry._  
 _Redundant. SH_

Away from Baker Street, John’s month shapes up like so:

i.

John brings his notebook to the Criterion and settles at a table with his favorite pen and a profoundly overpriced cup of coffee. He writes a list and titles it, Make Your Own Damn Life. It reads, “1. Get job. 2. Write something not about cases. 3. Start relationship and don’t let work ruin it. 4. Find new flatmate.” He re-reads the lines, feeling that his goals are boring. He tries to come up with better ideas, but dull as they are, these are the things he wants. It occurs to him that the excitement in his life tends to happen despite, not because of, him. He is disappointed to realise it.

ii.

Cynthia invites John to attend a lecture with her at UCL. It’s about Modernist poetry, which sounds approximately as appealing to him as getting coldcocked behind a pub, but he’ll sit through it if he gets to take her to dinner afterward. The lecture is just this side of interminable, although he is interested in one of the poems the professor projects onto the whiteboard (something about mortality and a trapped sea). She tells them that all poetry is about death, when it isn’t about sex, and sometimes when it is. Later, at the Indian restaurant Cynthia chooses, John pictures that sea from the poem and wonders what waves look like when they have no shore to break against.

iii.

Cynthia invites him to her place (small, unfussy, done in jewel tones) for tea and painting while her flatmate is out. She puts on the radio in the kitchen and spreads out tube after tube of acrylic paint on the kitchen table. She tells him that she treats her clients with art therapy, sometimes, that it helps them access their emotions without having to talk about them. John can see the appeal. She gives him a brush and a canvas and a cup for rinsing, then lets him be, losing herself in her own painting. After an hour, she’s finished a close-up of an orchid that John finds stunning, and John has made a… thing.

“It looks like a blob. Or a lump. A blump,” John frets.

“Hush, it’s lovely,” Cynthia reassures him. “I’m putting it on my wall.”

iv.

John meets Mike at Mike’s local, which is no palace, but at least John’s shoes don’t stick to the floor. Mike grouses about his latest divorce—this one’s number three, if John’s not mistaken—while John nods and makes the requisite sympathetic-friend noises. Two pints in, Mike runs out of steam and asks John why he won’t be retiring with Sherlock.

“I don’t want to twiddle my thumbs in some bloody cottage in Sussex,” John complains. He can’t think of anything else he wants to say.

They both shrug. Mike mentions that he knows someone at a clinic that’s hiring; he gives John a name and a number to call, adding that he’ll put a good word in for him. Mike blinks behind his glasses, lenses thicker now than ever. He’s a good enough guy, John supposes, but they’ve never had much in common. Fortunately, there’s beer.

v.

Cynthia asks him to another UCL lecture. Even though his response is an internal scream, he goes along. The professor tells the class that when reading literary fiction, one should keep in mind that couples who are not married are suspect, couples who are married without having sex are suspect, and couples who are married without having children are suspect. These are Signals To The Reader That Something Is Wrong With These Characters.

At dinner, as he eats his way through a plate of tandoori chicken and accidentally-on-purpose rests his foot against Cynthia’s, John is profoundly glad that he did not study lit.

vi.

Harry, predictably, isn’t having any of it. “Oh, John-Boy, no,” Harry says, shaking his head from the other end of his well-worn sofa. “You can’t.”

While he’s long since adjusted to Harry being his older brother, John is still thrown off-balance by how much they look alike now. It’s a bit like looking into a mirror, except Harry has a trendier sense of style, and—unfairly, despite the years of booze and the receding hairline and the bit of extra weight—looks better preserved, damn it. John’s surprised by how much that really does irritate him. “You’re right,” he says, “I can’t. That’s why I’m not going.”

“You fucking idiot,” Harry says, in the not-particularly-malicious tone of long-suffering older siblings the world over, “you’re going to break both your hearts. Again.”

“I have to, Hare,” John replies, “I need to know. What I can be if I’m not—if I’m not following him around like high tide after the bloody moon.”

The front door swings open and Clara steps in, closing it gently behind her. “Hi, John,” she says with a small smile, tucking her hair behind her ears. He nods at her. John has never understood what Harry sees in Clara (she’s always seemed a co-dependent little thing, bossing Harry around under the pretense of taking care of him), but it would be impossible for him to miss the adoration between her and his brother. He wonders whether he’ll ever have that, and then, with an unease that makes him drop that line of thought, whether he already has.

vii.

Cynthia meets him at a restaurant near the Met after she gets out of work. He takes Cynthia’s drink order (gin martini) and approaches the bar, a sleek, glassy affair with the stark too-bright-too-direct lighting John associates with crime scene photographs. The bartender nods at John’s requests and sets to work. Meanwhile, a man leaning against the bar in a suit and tie looks at John, then at Cynthia, then back at John. The man gives John a knowing wink and says, “Jungle fever, eh?”

Things go blank after that. When John comes back to himself, there’s cold air on his face and he can feel the bouncer’s fists clutched in the back of his jacket as he deposits him on the sidewalk. His knuckles are bloodied and stinging.

Cynthia follows him out, arms crossed over her chest, mouth tight. She usually looks serious, she’s an earnest sort of person, but she’s particularly intense as she tells him, “You can’t do that. You can’t let yourself get triggered.”

“But he said—”

“John, I can imagine what he said, I’ve been black my whole. Life. I’ve heard it all. It doesn’t matter what he said. If you do anything to escalate the situation, you make it worse for me. Don’t ever do that again. Do you understand me?”

Life with Sherlock has prepared John for staying calm when he feels spectacularly stupid (he hasn’t thought of that, how has he never thought of that), so he says, simply, “Yes.”

At her apartment, Cynthia cleans and dresses his scrapes. Her hands are gentle. When she’s finished, she laces her fingers through his.

viii.

John sits at the Criterion with his laptop, working on a draft for his new blog. Well, that’s what he’s here to do, anyway. So far, he’s checked the BBC’s website for news, then the Daily Mail’s, because sometimes there are nuggets of truth in the nonsense and he likes trying to find them. Then he reads The Onion, which is not only complete shite, but American, but it’s shite that makes him laugh. By the time he’s finished the article about a message in a bottle from some singer named Björk that supposedly washed up at Costa Blanca, he’s forced to admit that he really, truly has no idea what to write.

He has plenty of stories from Afghanistan, but neither for love nor for money will he tell them on a blog. He has stories from medical school and his years of specialty training, but he suspects some of them might rather undermine the confidence of the British public. Mycroft wouldn’t appreciate that. Other than that….

John gives up. He steps outside and calls the number Mike gave him. He’s bounced from extension to extension until he finally gets through to the right person, who says that John’s credentials sound in line with what the clinic is looking for, and could he come by for an interview next Monday? He could.

ix.

On a walk around Hampstead Heath, John and Cynthia climb Parliament Hill. John tries to hide that he is panting by the time they reach the top; Cynthia makes the hike seem effortless. She’s dressed in black and grey layers, substantial Dr. Martens, and a bright red cap that John compliments. She crocheted it herself, it turns out.

They stand next to each other and take in the view, John’s arm around her shoulders, Cynthia’s arm around his lower back. John felt touristy asking her to come here, but he can’t deny the beauty of their fog-wreathed city from this high up.

Cynthia squeezes him, gently, and says, “John, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

John takes a deep breath. “Cynthia, you’re clever, and beautiful, and talented. I want very much to spend more time with you, but I swear to God, if you ask me to another lecture, I will cry. I will break down. You will see a grown man, a veteran of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, actually sob.”

She laughs. “No more lectures, I promise. Nothing like that. I just wanted to know, is it alright if I call you my boyfriend? You’re—I’m rather taken with you, frankly, and I’d like it if we were exclusive. What do you think?”

John grins. This feeling of being liked, of being wanted—it never gets old. “I think my girlfriend and I should walk down the hill and celebrate over dinner,” he says. The kiss they share is brief, which is appropriate since they’re in public, but full of a heat that John finds promising.

He wonders, as he wonders at the start of each of his relationships, whether this woman will be the one who transforms him into the settled, married man he has, in some inexplicable depth of his being, always felt that he should be.

* 

He already tried marriage, though.

She was 35, hardly ancient for a CF patient. Even without the two MDs they held between them, they would have known that she was struggling.

Still, he couldn’t say no.

Because she was absurdly affectionate, and open, and because she got it: that there wasn’t much time. By the time you met someone and came to care about them, your days were numbered, and they were too few.

(“You loved him,” she said, and he disagreed. She stopped him mid-sentence and insisted, “No, John, you lie to yourself if you think you’ve time, I can’t stop you, but you don’t lie to me. When Sherlock jumped, you lost the love of your life.” He hadn’t argued the point; he didn’t want to waste her remaining time, not even for a few minutes.)

He pounded her back to clear the fluid from her lungs, took extra hours at the clinic when she grew too sick to maintain her own practice, and wept with her when she was denied a place on the lung transplant list because her pancreas was too far gone. He ignored the cutting remarks she made about him on her bad days. Despite the prevailing wisdom of the woman-dies-tragically-young films—that such women were half mystic sage, half manic pixie—terminally ill women were just people who happened to be dying. Like any other people, they could be right assholes, and Mary was no exception.

John, to his surprise, turned to Harry to vent his frustrations. In one of their early conversations, Harry commented dryly that he felt it was safe to complain to her because no matter how much of a bastard he sounded, he could never outdo her. He was surprised into laughter. After that, their rapport grew stronger. It reminded John of their easy openness as children, before Harry had grown gawky and found cigarettes and their father’s vodka and girls to share them with. John, a late bloomer, had taken Harry’s withdrawal personally.

Slowly, over the two years he and Mary ended up having, John and Harry stitched themselves back together one laconic text, one cup of coffee at a time. By the morning John woke to find Mary still beside him (respiration arrested pulse absent skin cool lips cyanotic, his training duly informed him), Harry was three years sober. John trusted her enough to rely on her help with the funeral arrangements, which went off without a hitch. It was John who sprawled on Harry’s sofa after the last of the out-of-town relatives went home, babbling at her in the patter of the well and truly smashed.

“I just did this,” John groaned, draping one arm over his eyes.

“Did what?” Harry asked, tossing the wasteland of John’s empties into a paper sack.

“This funeral shit. This grief shit. How many people, Hare? How many times am I going to be left holding the bag?” John waved his arms about in emphasis, then realized that his sense of the relationship between his body and gravity might not be up to the challenge and went still.

“At least one more time,” Harry quipped, “I’m statistically just about certain to drop dead before you do.”

“Dammit, Harry, that isn’t funny. Jesus, do you have to do that so loud? I’ve heard IEDs quieter than that,” John demanded as the glass bottles rolled against each other in the sack.

“It’s not loud, you’re drunk,” she said evenly, “and if you’re sick of funerals, you should pick your lovers more carefully. Losing two in three years—that’s just sloppy, John, and you a doctor.”

“Sherlock wasn’t my lover,” John protested, “and for the last time, I am not gay.”

“You’re not straight, either, unless you and that bloke from rugby were practicing some new play that required shagging whenever you brought him home with you from uni,” she shot back.

“How did—Harry—no, you know what, never mind. Don’t tell me. I don’t hate you anymore, and I want to keep it that way,” John sighed, feeling worse than drunk and more than defeated.

Harry lifted his feet, sending John’s head spinning, and plopped down on the cushion, pulling his feet into her lap. She patted his ankles, and John imagined that he could feel the big-sisterly condescension oozing over them. She sighed, too, a twin of his own, and said, “Look, John, it’s nothing awful. I used to sneak into my room to sleep it off, even after Mum kicked me out, and sometimes I’d wake up and—well, you’re not exactly quiet, brother dear. Especially when you think there’s no one home.”

John needed a few minutes to absorb her words, taking frequent breaks to confirm which direction of motion would secure him on the sofa and which would land him on the floor. He kept figuring it out, but then getting so confused that he had to start his experiments over from the beginning.

“I miss Mary,” he murmured, once he gave up the floor/sofa distinction as a bad job.

“I know,” Harry replied, ankle pats and all. Under no circumstances would John have admitted it, but he found it comforting.

John felt that he and Harry were hurtling through space, somehow staying anchored as they flipped in the void. “In Afghanistan,” he said, slurring his words together. “Patients. I always gave myself the ones who were, not hopeless, we didn’t have enough supplies for hopeless, but the next thing to it. The guys in my unit started calling me Saint Jude. They were taking the piss, but I liked it. I wanted to be the one who, the one who never—”

John couldn’t continue, but he couldn’t tell why. He pieced together that he a) was out of air, because he b) couldn’t inhale enough, because he c) was sobbing. _A deduction, Sherlock,_ John thought crookedly, _you would be so proud._ Harry’s hand made gentle circles over his back.

“Your heart’s always been too big for you, John-Boy,” Harry mumbled. “And you haven’t the sense to care about people who won’t break it.”

“I don’t want people who won’t break it, I want Sherlock,” John insisted, “but he killed himself and I’m not that brave, Harry. I wanted to, after, but I couldn’t.”

“Okay,” Harry grimaced, “we’re getting morose, here. My cue to leave. I’ve left you a rubbish bin. When you retch, retch there. ‘Night, John-Boy,” she said with a final pat of John’s ankle.

“‘Night, Dirty Harry,” he called to her departing back, and she flipped him off as she turned around to grin at him. The last thing he remembered was his injured shoulder screaming bloody murder, but he was too far gone to do anything about it but pass out.

The next morning, John woke up with a hangover so large he marveled that it fit in the flat, much less in his war zone of a head, and the vague impression that he had said more than he’d meant to. The details escaped him. The sludge in his stomach was about to do the same. He reached for the bin, and was surprised into gratitude.

Sometime in the night, Harry had turned him onto his good shoulder.

*

With Sherlock, John’s November goes like so:

i.

John loses his debit card; at least, he thinks that he loses his debit card. After weeks of John keeping agonized track of everything he buys on credit, living in dread of charging more than he can pay and facing the card’s exorbitant interest rates, Sherlock mentions that he has locked the debit card in his desk drawer. To prevent John losing it, he claims. Sherlock acts as though he doesn’t understand why John breaks into his desk and won’t talk to him for the next three days, but John sees Sherlock smirking when he doesn’t think John is looking, so John isn’t having any of it.

ii.

Sherlock sends John out to Farnham to scout out some godforsaken cyclists, one of whom John admits is easy on the eyes, but John really isn’t interested and can think of lots of ways he’d rather spend his Saturday than hiding out in a shrubbery, spying on some yobbo who’s following a woman but refuses to get anywhere near her. He’s sore and filthy and tired by the time he drags himself up the stairs to 221B. He can feel his pulse as pain in his wounded foot. He makes his report to Sherlock, who loses no time in informing John that he has done, as John will later quote in a bitter rant to Harry, “remarkably badly”. John takes this criticism, well, remarkably badly.

iii.

Sherlock somehow acquires a handgun, which he takes with him to chase after some criminal he doesn’t bother to name, and he turns snarky when John expresses doubts as to the wisdom of his decision. Which is rich, because Jesus limping Christ, John has with his own two eyes seen Sherlock scratch his own head with a loaded firearm, which, just, _no._ John knows that Sherlock hasn’t had military training and so has not, like John, had the correct procedures drilled into him until they are rote, but still. Christ.

iv.

John makes two pieces of morning toast, one of them with butter. It’s been his routine for years: John asks Sherlock if he wants toast, Sherlock says no, John eats the buttered piece, Sherlock eats the dry one from off John’s plate. Periodically, John tries not making the dry piece in an effort to get Sherlock to ask for his toast like a fucking grown-up, but then Sherlock eats the buttered one, so. Two days into November, though, John finds the dry toast gone stale when he does the dishes in the evening. It happens every day for two weeks, at which point John stops bothering. By the last weekend of the month, Sherlock bores a new hole in his favourite belt with his letter opener. John says nothing.

v.

Sherlock disappears for a week without explanation. John isn’t nervous for the first three days of radio silence; Sherlock’s concept of keeping him informed has never been overdeveloped. By day six, John tells himself at least once an hour that if Sherlock were truly in trouble, John would have heard from Mycroft by now. (He still calls Mycroft. And Molly. And Greg. Just in case.) In the meantime, a veritable parade of London’s chavviest keeps him and Mrs. Hudson busy answering the door. They ask by name for what John imagines is either one of Sherlock’s many fake identities, or a new form of street drug. John wonders whether it’s too much to hope that it’s both.

vi.

When he returns, Sherlock has a split lip that isn’t healing right and a contusion on his forehead that gives John sympathy pains just looking at it. John offers to stitch the lip together and ice the bruise. “I’d rather you didn’t,” Sherlock intones, “I see from the dust strata that you’ve not kept up with your medical journals.” Why he would need to have read the latest studies on viral gastroenteritis in immuno-compromised geriatrics to stitch up a blessed lip John cannot imagine, but he mutters, “Suit yourself,” and spends the rest of the night in his bedroom with the door closed, pretending that he can’t hear Sherlock’s plaintive new violin.

vii.

John’s in a fresh dress shirt and ironed trousers and, the coup de grâce, a splurge of a cashmere jumper that he can’t quite believe he bought. His neatly-combed hair is still damp from the shower, leaving him chilled as he searches the flat for his keys. Sherlock’s in one of his messier phases, his papers stacked on every available surface, and John knows better than to disturb them. The thing is, he suspects that his keys are under one fallen heap or another (after all these years, he really ought to have learned to keep his keys in his bedroom, but, no fool like an old fool, etc.) He texts Cynthia to warn her that he’s going to be late, then sets to work.

Forty minutes later, he’s elbow-deep in a pile of tabloids when he feels jagged metal. He plucks his keys out, shrugs on his jacket, opens the front door, and—stops short, because he’s about to walk into Sherlock. He smells of damp wool and adrenaline. Sherlock’s gaze flickers over John’s shoulder as he takes in the shuffled papers, then returns to John, who is preparing his defense. He holds John’s gaze for a long moment, then walks into his bedroom and closes the door. John considers going after him and picking a fight, but he’s running late as it is.

viii.

John comes downstairs to find wrappers, and then too many used syringes, on the floor by the sofa. He’s in Sherlock’s bedroom shaking Sherlock awake before he finds words to put to his horror. Sherlock, however, is pillow-creased and disoriented and warm; Sherlock is as John would expect him to be had John interrupted an ordinary sleep. Once John has found words and Sherlock has found the ability to make sense of them, it emerges that that is, in fact, what John has done. Sherlock snarls, “I didn’t. Take. Anything. I was testing to see if the needles were strong enough to deliver various fluids into an inflatable tyre. Get out.”

ix.

Sherlock wakes John at what John determines to be the absolute ass-crack of dawn and drags him to a train platform, where John shivers in the darkness and watches his breath spiral as he blows into his hands and doesn’t bother asking why they’re out here or where they’re going. Neither one of them says a word until they’ve been on the train long enough for John to fall asleep, cheek pressed against the cold windowpane.

“I read your most recent blog post,” Sherlock says, and John startles awake and braces himself. In the fifteen years he has been writing about Sherlock’s cases, Sherlock has started many conversations this way, and none of them have been pleasant for John.

“Oh?” John tries.

“Sensationalized drivel,” Sherlock gripes, “and despite my clear instructions, John, you ignore my scientific methods and blather on about the cyclist’s clothing, as though you’re running some kind of fashion blog.”

“Why don’t you write them up yourself?” John complains, bitterness seizing him.

Sherlock answers, “I will.”

When Cynthia asks him the next day if he would be interested in moving in with her, John says, “God, yes.”

“I know it’s too soon—”

“Nope, nope—”

“—but my flatmate’s leaving at the end of December—”

“—timing’s perfect, I may actually kill Sherlock if things keep up the way they—”

“—would rather take a risk on you than on some friend of a friend or stranger or what-have-you.”

John says, “Great.”

Cynthia says, “Great.”

He signs the lease the next week.


	3. January

_Going well, then. SH_  
 _What?_  
 _The girlfriend. SH_  
 _What makes you say that?_  
 _And she has a name._  
 _A month without a word from my blogger? SH_  
 _You’re dead or shagging, and you’re not dead. SH_  
 _I read the obituaries. I’d know. SH_  
 _Names are irrelevant. SH_  
 _Are you there? SH_  
 _Being swarmed by bees, send help. SH_  
 _And empty jars. SH_  
 _For honey. SH_  
 _Because bees. SH_  
 _You’re bored. Get Dimmock to find you a cold case._  
 _Am not bored. Am entertaining you. SH_  
 _Nope. Desperate bid for attention._  
 _You’re no fun when you have a girlfriend. SH_  
 _You won’t ruin this for me._  
 _Please. As if I’ve nothing better to do. SH_  
 _Goodnight, Sherlock._  
 _BEES, John. SH_

“John Watson,” Cynthia says, flopping down on the cushion next to his, “if you leave the toilet seat up one more time, I will destroy you.”

“Miss your old flatmate yet?” John teases, scooting over to make room for her. They’ve just got home from dinner with Molly and Greg, which was pleasant, if slightly awkward.

Cynthia shakes her head. “No, despite you causing me to fall into the bloody toilet, again, I don’t think I will. We didn’t live together very long. I moved in here after I ended my last relationship.”

“Ah. Just a few months, then?” John asks.

Cynthia grabs the popcorn bowl from him. It’s dreadful, some sort of low-fat low-sodium microwave abomination that Cynthia insists on because “when you make it, you just melt a stick of butter and empty the salt shaker over it like you’re trying to kill us both before we reach sixty.”

She leans against him as she starts the movie they’re streaming. It’s some romantic comedy, even though they don’t like the genre any more than Jude and Tabba do. Since Cynthia and John have found that they have a difficult time making it through a movie without ending up in bed, they’ve given up and preemptively choose forgettable titles. “Yeah, a few months,” she confirms between handfuls.

Cynthia’s talked about it before, but not much. John knows her partner was a woman, and they were together for a long time, and her partner didn’t want her to leave. That’s all. Cynthia’s not been forthcoming with details, and John hasn’t wanted to pry.

The movie is, as usual, dull, and Cynthia seems, unusually, not interested in snogging him. John’s mind wanders as boredom sets in. He looks around their living room, which is full of Cynthia’s furniture. The whole place is, really. There’s a lot of painted wicker and a lot of mirrors. It’s a rather more trendy space than he’s used to.

It’s easy, living with her. They divvied up the housework early on, decided on who would do what, and when, and what they expected from each other in terms of how thoroughly the work got done. He likes that. He likes knowing that there is an outside order to things, and that he has a defined role to play in it.

There is only food in the refrigerator—well, that and Cynthia’s tube of Anthralin for her psoriasis, which she keeps in its own plastic container, which she labels. God and all His angels bless her, how novel that is.

She’s lovely, and bright, and hardworking. More than anything, she isn’t damaged; no war is haunting her, and no criminals are coming after her. Sometimes, John has to breathe through his anger until it fades because she can’t imagine her life being any other way.

Imagination isn’t her strong suit, full stop, which is wonderful when John needs to be talked down. She once succeeded in convincing him that the tree outside their bedroom window was shaking because there was a family of squirrels in it—he’d not believed her until she’d pointed them out, grey-brown and chunky—and not because someone was waiting until John fell asleep to attack.

“Could’ve been the squirrels waiting to attack,” John had tried, sheepishly. Cynthia had smiled, and kissed his shoulder, and said nothing.

Her lack of imagination is less wonderful when he tries to explain why he’s out of synch with her on something, like the coat she gave him for Christmas. It’s a fine coat, a lovely coat, but it makes him taste chlorine and bile because it reminds him too much of the coat from the pool—which, while he’s on the subject, is not a place that he can go with her.

She’s a psychiatrist. She understands it, absolutely. That doesn’t mean that she shares his feelings, or that she doesn’t want them—doesn’t want him—to be different.

When he is with her, though, John has stretches of almost feeling like he’s normal, too. Their conversations center on the logistics of their schedules, their friends, their families, and grousing about work. It’s so refreshing after a lifetime of the government’s war in Afghanistan and Sherlock’s war in London to stop fighting and just be that he feels like he’s on holiday, even on the days when he’s working at the clinic. Holidays can’t last, he often thinks, but as one of the Americans he served with used to say, he’ll burn that bridge when he comes to it.

Anyway, Cynthia appreciates what he does for her. Out loud. Regularly. He’s been starved for gratitude for so long, he’s forgotten how sweet it is to have enough. It’s delicious.

“You know her,” Cynthia blurts out.

John blinks. “Sorry, I was woolgathering. What?”

“You know my ex.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Why didn’t you tell—” Oh. Stupid, John, stupid. Because Cynthia knows that John doesn’t get along with her, that’s why, and the list of people that John doesn’t get along with isn’t terribly large, so it wouldn’t take him long to figure out that— “Sally.”

“I thought you wouldn’t take me seriously if you knew, right away. Everyone knows that she and Sherlock don’t—well.”

She’s probably right, which doesn’t leave John feeling great about himself. “She’s—Sherlock wasn’t very nice to her. Isn’t. Very nice. So.” He clears his throat. “I can see why she, uh, wouldn’t have thought well of him. During that whole thing.” It’s not enough, he knows, but it’s the best he’s going to be able to do.

“I know Sherlock doesn’t get on with her, but she really is wonderful. Danced around the house the day she made D.I. Woke me up, even in the middle of the night, to tell me when she had a breakthrough on a case. She was always so excited. The unsolved ones drive her ‘round the twist.”

It’s strange to John to see Sally through sympathetic eyes; he’s recognized his dislike for her as irrational since it began, but that hasn’t stopped it. He wonders, uneasily, what he’s missed about her over the years.

“Still love her?” he asks, while trying to figure out what’s happening in their movie. Some poor sod is running down the middle of a busy street dressed like a carton of milk, though, so catching up is probably a lost cause.

“Yeah, I do,” Cynthia answers, sounding sad. “I don’t think that will ever change. I’ll always want her most.”

“What are you doing wasting your time with me, then?” John asks. He’s not upset; it’s not as though he can’t relate.

She throws a bolster pillow at him. “Come off it, John. You’re not a waste of my time. You’re just… the best compromise between what I want, and what’s good for me.”

“Come to bed, and I’ll show you what’s good for you,” he says in his most suggestive suave-boyfriend voice, because he’d rather have sex right now than think about his own compromises. Cynthia laughs and retrieves the pillow just so she can throw it at him again.

“What about you?” she asks. “Still love him?”

She’s too fast for him, dammit. He wishes they’d retired to bed instead stumbling into this conversation. He keeps his face carefully blank, but there’s a lump in his throat, and he doesn’t trust himself to talk. He nods.

“What’s he like?” Cynthia asks. “Other than the obvious.”

John swallows. _He’s halfway to an eating disorder,_ he thinks.

 _There’s a serious scar on his left thigh that, if I had to place money on it, I’d say he put there himself when he was younger just to practice stitching himself up,_ he thinks.

 _Even though I doubt that he’s ever had sex or gone on a date with anyone, much less with me, he’s the love of my life. I’ve never told him,_ he thinks.

John shrugs and says, “There’s not an hour goes by that I don’t worry, because he’s alone, and I know he needs me.”

“Bit of a drug, being needed,” Cynthia points out.

“Yeah.”

“Until you forget who the hell you are when you’re not playing the admiring audience to your one-woman—or one-man—show.”

John stares at her. “Yeah.”

“I’m speaking from experience, here,” Cynthia clarifies. “I spent twelve years of my life revolving around Sally like some sort of…” She trails off, looking embarrassed. “Well. The clinical term for it, for playing audience like that, is ‘providing narcissistic supply.’”

John raises his eyebrows. “That sounds ominous,” he says.

“I think that’s the idea,” Cynthia jokes. “I try to scare my patients into bettering themselves.”

“Won’t work on me. I’ve been scared lots, and I’m still awful,” John deadpans.

Cynthia winks at him. “That’s alright. So am I.”

“Care to prove it?” John teases, running his hand along her calf.

“Do you turn everything into innuendo?” Cynthia asks, sounding exasperated and amused.

“Most things, when I’m thinking about sex,” John admits.

Cynthia smiles a small and secret smile. “Let’s see if we can’t get you to stop thinking,” she suggests, turning off the television.

An hour later, John collapses face-first into their mattress, gasping.

“Liked that, did you?” Cynthia asks, leaning off the side of the bed.

It takes him a few breaths to find enough brain cells to form a reply, and when he does, it’s hardly an epic poem. “Oh, my God. That was—God.”

“I do love to make you scream,” Cynthia admits. He hears her peel off her gloves and bin them, then hears the plunk when she drops the lube back into the nightstand drawer. “It’s like every time, you forget how much you like it, and every time, you’re surprised. Loudly. And happily. And loudly,” she teases.

“Was that—I can’t imagine how that could possibly be as good for you as it is for me. Feels selfish,” John manages, dragging himself toward his pillow and finding it inordinately difficult to coordinate his limbs.

Cynthia settles onto one elbow and watches him struggle. “I enjoy it quite a lot, actually,” she says. “Besides, I seem to remember you giving me a fair bit of attention, first.”

John flops onto his back and sinks bonelessly into the bed. He is so very, very sleepy. “Funny,” he says through a yawn, “the way I remember it, you ordered me to.”

“You like it when I order you around in bed,” she scoffs, teasing her fingers through his fringe.

He grins, his eyes closing as he dozes off, and says, “I love it.” He feels Cynthia kiss his forehead just as he goes under.

It seems to him that his phone rings moments later. He curses and flails his hand across his bedside table until he finds it. Harry’s dead, he thinks automatically, before he remembers that Harry’s been sober for ages, and John doesn’t get late-night calls about him anymore.He grimaces when he sees the name.

“Mycroft, what time is it?”

“Hello, John. It is half midnight, I believe, which I suppose is rather late for a social call. I do apologise; I quite lost track of the time.”

What the hell? “What do you want?” John asks blearily. Cynthia groans and sits up, and John mouths I’m sorry at her until she shrugs, rolls over, and goes back to sleep.

Mycroft clears his throat and says, “John, I’m concerned about my brother.”

John squinches his eyes tight against his impatience. “And this required waking me up at half midnight because?”

“As I said, John, I was not aware that it was so late. I am sorry.” He coughs. “In any event, Sherlock has been… even less competent at taking care of himself than usual, lately. I was rather hoping that you would be willing to look in on him from time to time, make sure he is not—overindulging in some things, or underindulging in others.”

He wants to help. It’s almost overwhelming, really. He thinks of what Cynthia said earlier, about balancing what she needs with what she wants.

“He’s in Sussex half the time, Mycroft, and I don’t live at Baker Street anymore. Find someone else,” John says with more certainty than he feels.

Mycroft sighs. “I was afraid you would respond this way. He won’t listen to anyone but you. You know that, John.”

John takes a deep breath. “That’s his problem, now, and maybe yours, but not mine. Goodnight, Mycroft,” he says, and ends the call.

Cynthia is deeply asleep. He shapes his body around hers, holding her, sharing her warmth. He tries to sleep, and tries to feel that he is doing the right thing. He does get to sleep, at least, eventually.

*

 _That’s all that’s left,_ John thinks, feeling as emptied as his third-floor bedroom.

He picks up the manila envelope on the kitchen table. A yellow sticky note is pressed to its front: “Your half.—SH.” Inside is a chequebook and a monthly statement for a bank account in John’s name. Even though John signed all the paperwork last week, even though he handled a not-insignificant portion of the boring business of cashing their cheques and checking their balances over the years, he finds the numbers dizzying in magnitude. There’s a packet about his investment portfolio, as well. He’s average at maths, but even he can tell that he doesn’t need to keep working at the clinic.

He probably will, though.

John tucks the envelope under his arm and looks around the flat. It’s been picked over; Sherlock has been taking things to Sussex with him a few at a time. John is no longer sure what he is saying goodbye to. There’s a pale spot on the wall where the cow skull used to be, the mantle is bare and—incredibly—dusted, and there is not a single vial, beaker, decanter, or microscope to be found. Both his chair and Sherlock’s are gone.

He leaves, pulling the door closed behind him. The entryway smells of varnish and aging wood, and each familiar stair creaks as he expects it to. He knocks on Mrs. Hudson’s door, engulfing her in a massive hug when she answers it. She’s healthy, as far as John can tell, but so small. Her apron hangs loosely on her tiny frame.

She leads him into her flat (tidy, redolent of cough sweets, upholstered within an inch of its life) and parks him at her kitchen table. They’ve never needed to say much to enjoy each other’s company, and after this much time, they hardly need to say anything at all. “Kettle’s already boiled, I’ll get us a cuppa,” Mrs. Hudson says.

“At least let me help,” John asks. Mrs. Hudson gives him a gimlet stare that shuts him up; he throws up his hands, signalling defeat. Mrs. Hudson nods, apparently satisfied. Her movements are slow and confident. John has never asked her age, not directly, but she must be pushing ninety, at least.

“221b is emptying out, it seems,” John says once they have their tea and Mrs. Hudson has settled into her chair.

Mrs Hudson shakes her head. “Oh, it makes me so sad to see it, John. It just isn’t right.”

“Mrs. Hudson!” calls a voice that can only be Sherlock’s, and John’s stomach drops, “I’ve brought you your tea.” He bursts into the flat (still looking too thin, John thinks, and manic around the edges, the way he gets when he pushes himself too hard) and gives a curt nod. “John.”

John is surprised to see him. Sherlock, unsurprisingly, seems unsurprised. He smells of cigarette smoke.

“Honestly, Mrs. Hudson, you could have at least tried to be subtle about it. Asking me to pick you up more Earl Grey, but you had me ‘round three days ago, and I saw that you’d an entire box of it yet unopened. Why would you ask me to get you more?”

“Sherlock—,” Mrs. Hudson tries, but Sherlock’s built up too much theatrical steam to be stopped.

“Clearly a pretext for dragging me into some misadventure, one that you feared I would fail to go along with were I aware of its true nature. What would you want me to do that I wouldn’t want to do? Simple: say a fond farewell to John on his way out of Baker Street. How maudlin, and unnecessary, and likely to be embarrassing for all parties.”

“Sherlock—”

“You knew I would refuse you if you asked flat-out, so you waited until John told you when he’d be by for the last of his things: teatime today. You then pretended you were out of Earl Grey and asked that I bring you some this afternoon, thus creating a likely overlap between my time here and John’s. ‘Aha!’ you thought, ‘a chance to get my boys sorted!’”

“Sherlock!”

“—because it’s painfully evident that you dislike it when John and I fight, though I must disappoint you, I’m afraid, as unless you’ve put your herbal soothers in it, John and I are very unlikely to reconcile over tea.”

Mrs. Hudson looks at Sherlock for a moment with an expression John can’t quite read, then says, “Well, you came by, anyway.”

Sherlock plunks down the box of tea, peels off his coat, and takes a seat at the table.

“I, um, got the envelope you left,” John starts.

Sherlock sets his face in the way that John thinks of as “polite-interest-and-by-the-way-fuck-you.” “Did you? Grand.”

“Thanks for putting everything together,” John says, his voice stiff.

“Oh, you’re welcome,” Sherlock says. “The least I could do for a former business partner who’s moved on to better things.”

Stung, John retorts, “Hang on, you’re the one who decided to close up shop without consulting me, which, for a consulting detective, is bloody inexplicable.”

Sherlock snaps, “I thought we’d move on together. I was not aware that you were only living with me because we were co-workers.”

Mrs. Hudson slaps her hand down on the table hard enough that the cups and saucers rattle. “Alright, boys, enough. Stop punishing each other,” she orders.

“I’m not ‘punishing’ him,” John complains, at the same time that Sherlock protests, “I can hardly think what I might have done to deserve that accusation.”

“You stole his chip-and-PIN card, you tosser,” Mrs. Hudson hisses at Sherlock under her breath, cuffing him upside the back of his head. Sherlock stares at her, looking comically taken aback, and she glowers at him, and John can’t help it. He’s laughing, first in stifled noises at the back of his throat, but they won’t fit there, so he gives up and lets the sounds roll out of him. His belly is heaving and tears are running down his face because Mrs. Hudson just called Sherlock a tosser, and hit him, and those things are funnier than they ought to be. Mrs. Hudson is laughing, too, which makes John laugh harder, and Sherlock looks affronted, and John actually has to fight to inhale because all his body wants to do is push out laughter.

“He got it back,” Sherlock grumbles once they’ve quieted down, which sets them going again. Sherlock appears to be stifling a smirk.

The conversation goes easier after that. Nothing significant gets said—not much gets said at all, really—but it’s nice. By the time John is hugging Mrs. Hudson goodbye, he feels comfortable.

“Promise that you’ll call me if you need, if you want, anything at all,” John tells her.

“I will, John. I will.” She pulls back and pats his face, murmuring, “My boys,” as he and Sherlock leave.

He follows Sherlock into the entryway, then onto the front step. It feels like thousands of other moments here, with him, and yet it feels like none of them.

“I suppose this is goodbye, then,” John hazards.

Sherlock slides his hands into his coat pockets. “So it would seem,” he says.

“I’ll be in touch.”

“That is what one says in these situations, I believe.”

John knows there’s no chance that he’ll come up with words for this moment. He looks into Sherlock’s eyes and lets Sherlock read his face, instead.

John turns to leave, but Sherlock reaches out and grabs the sleeve of John’s coat. John looks back at him expectantly.

Sherlock opens his mouth. Nothing happens. He takes a deep breath, then says, the words stumbling one over another, “I will never understand why you couldn’t think of us as a couple because we didn’t have sex.” He slides his grasp from John’s sleeve to John’s hand, squeezes once, and lets go. His long strides carry him down the street and out of sight.

John takes a seat on the front step. His nose and ears are numb from the cold, and his legs asleep, before he wants to stand.


	4. July / August

_Know you said you wouldn’t come. Thought I’d ask again._  
 _Not my area, weddings. SH_  
 _Sad you won’t be there._  
 _One of us ought to be, I suppose. SH_  
 _Do you have to do this?_  
 _Evidently. SH_  
 _Are you jealous?_  
 _Don’t be ridiculous. SH_  
 _Didn’t answer my question._  
 _Goodnight, John. SH_  
 _Answer me, Sherlock._  
 _Sherlock. Dammit._  
 _It is customary to end a conversation with “goodnight”. SH_  
 _Perhaps you were not aware. SH_  
 _Since when have you cared about… never mind, sod this._  
 _Goodnight, John. SH_

*

Cynthia and John are lost in their separate and silent thoughts when they get home from dinner. The flat feels chillier than usual. John sees that the kitchen window is open, and that there are muddy footprints on the lino.

His first thought is, _Thank God. Finally._

His second thought is, _Bit not good, John._

Calm and alert, John urges Cynthia into the bathroom. She looks at him as though at a stranger as she presses her mobile to her ear, then shuts the door and turns the lock.

John sees that the footprints only go into the study. He creeps down the hall and into the bedroom, taking his gun from his dresser, loading it, and taking the safety off. He keeps his breathing quiet and controlled. He scans the hall as he pads down it, then crouches at the study door.

He hears movement inside.

He grins.

When the Met arrives, they find John sharing the living room couch with a terrified-looking teenager who is gawky and trembling and has a terrific bump on his forehead.

John and Cynthia give their reports to Dimmock as the lad is packed into the back of a squad car. Thankfully, Donovan isn’t there. He doesn’t imagine that Cynthia would enjoy that any more than he would.

They clean the mud from the floor once they’re alone.

“I must’ve forgotten to lock the window,” Cynthia mutters, scrubbing at the carpet with a brush.

John rinses and wrings out a towel in the sink. “It’s all right,” he says, thinking, _It’s more than all right, I wish to God I felt that alive more often._ “I’m glad you weren’t hurt.”

They get up the last of the mud, then put themselves to bed. John can’t sleep; he’s too excited. Finally, something happened, something he needed to be awake for, something that mattered. It’s brilliant. Granted, he would have preferred a worthier opponent—the kid had resisted fiercely, but without skill—but it’s better than nothing. Loads better, truth be told.

Cynthia rolls onto her side to face him. “You’re getting rid of the gun,” she says.

Worry settles into his stomach. “I can’t do that, Cyn.”

“Then the wedding’s off.” She looks grim and resigned.

John’s eyebrows shoot up. “Seriously? You’re not going to ask why—”

“It isn’t safe, John. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you had a gun here, that’s a lecture for another day, but if you get it out of the flat tomorrow, then that will be a start,” Cynthia decides. She seems like she is holding back a more scalding reproach.

“I need it,” he tries to explain.

“You don’t. This isn’t Afghanistan, this is Chelsea,” she retorts, then turns her back to him. Conversation’s over, then.

He falls into an angry sleep and wakes the way he used to in the service, instantly on alert. His mobile phone is vibrating and ringing. He answers as Cynthia groans.

“Who is this?”

“John?”

“Mycroft.” John exhales hard.

“John, I must ask your assistance,” Mycroft says, sounding as bright and bland as always.

“Nope, no, Mycroft, we’ve been over and over this, I’m not your brother’s minder, I’m engaged, and my fiancée deserves better than being woken up at—” He checks the angry red face of the bedside clock— “half two by my phone, which, by the way, was on silent, if you’d like to explain that.”

“Merely a precautionary bit of programming we use to ensure a ringtone, when we cannot afford to be ignored. I do wish you would hear me out.”

The light in the bedroom is low. All John sees are shadows and angles pinned one over another. “Don’t call me again. Goodnight.”

_“John.”_

It’s not Mycroft’s usual voice. It’s pleading, and raw, and indisputably human.

John sighs and squeezes the bridge of his nose. He watches Cynthia sleep, her face tucked against her pillow.

“I’m listening,” John murmurs, sliding from the bed as smoothly as he can manage and padding into the hall.

Mycroft hums. “My brother was—he hasn’t been well, as I indicated in my previous calls. His usual indiscretions, you understand.”

Shooting up and “forgetting” to eat, then. “And?”

“About a week ago, I paid him a visit since he had not seen fit to respond to my messages. I found him indisposed.”

“Mycroft, for Christ’s sake, tell me what’s happened,” John snaps, unable to keep the heat from his voice.

Mycroft sighs. “He was unconscious. He’d been—using—and he hit his head on the coffee table when he fell off the couch. Bled quite a lot, but that’s not the concern. You know how head wounds are.”

John’s stomach drops. He sees a blank blue stare in a pale face, a ruined head bloody on a sidewalk. He squeezes his eyelids shut so tightly that shapes explode behind them. “What. Is. The concern,” he manages, his voice straining.

“He’s developed sepsis from aspiration pneumonia, I’m afraid. He must have vomited before he passed out. His lungs failed, so he’s on a ventilator. As you are likely aware, it is not certain that he will survive.”

John leans his back against the bedroom door. “What do you want me to do,” he breathes, his voice feeling so, so small.

“Please come. Tonight, if you’d be so good.”

“Where?”

“Bart’s. Anthea will come by for you. Thank you, John.”

The line goes dead. John slides to the floor, his knees folded in front of him and his t-shirt rucked up. The wood feels cold against his skin. He sets the phone down, curls his toes into the carpet, and tilts his head back. He doesn’t focus his eyes; there is nothing to see.

*

_Sherlock’s had an emergency, on my way to Bart’s._  
 _Sorry for waking you. Will let you know more when I do._  
 _I love you._

*

The next week is—hard.

i.

Anthea, an ageless Charon who shows neither judgment nor pity, ferries John across town. John understands hospitals. He knows what the noises from the ventilator mean, and which tubes are doing what, and why Sherlock needs so many different drip bags for the IV taped along his arm. That doesn’t keep his stomach from clenching.

ii.

John sleeps each night in the chair next to Sherlock’s bed. It reclines, though it’s narrow and vinyl-covered and uncomfortable. John isn’t bothered. He doesn’t want to be comfortable. He checks and double-checks every piece of equipment, observes every procedure, and pleads or argues with the staff when he wants something done differently. He can tell that he’s driving the nurses ‘round the twist, which isn’t like him, but he can’t stop himself. John is determined that if Sherlock dies, it will not be because John didn’t pay attention.

iii.

Sherlock looks horrible: rail-thin, fever-hot, sunken. Mottled bruises surround the sutured line that runs from his forehead into his hair, marking where he hit the coffee table. The drugs keep him asleep most of the time, but when he’s awake, he’s too groggy to communicate. When one of the nurses moves his mask to check his endotracheal tube, John sees that his lip never healed correctly. A divot marks the place where someone struck him last fall. _I could have fixed that,_ John thinks, _if you would have let me._

iv.

Each day is a parade of drop-ins: doctors, nurses, respiratory therapist, dietician, social worker. John nods and clarifies their instructions and takes notes in a composition book he and Molly are sharing. She’s been by every night after she gets off of work; Greg has visited a few times during the day. The last time, he sat next to John, shaking his head. “You know,” he said, “if you would’ve told me that Sherlock’d have his mouth taped shut, and I wouldn’t be happy about it, I’d’ve told you that you were full of shit.”

v.

Anthea brings John home once a day so that he can change clothes and clean up. He stands in the shower, hot water running over him, too exhausted to think. Whenever they’re both home, Cynthia asks him if he needs anything. “No,” he says each time. It doesn’t feel like lying; he couldn’t articulate the truth if he tried.

vi.

On the fifth day, Sherlock breathes on his own. John sends Harry a relieved text; Harry responds, _Glad he’s back with you. This time, John-Boy, don’t fuck it up._

vii.

The fever spikes again. John is running an ice chip over Sherlock’s chapped lips, over their frightening heat, when Sherlock’s eyes flicker open. His stare is glassy and delirium-bright. “John,” he whispers, “your hands are so cold since you died.” John stills. “No,” he says, “don’t worry, I’m fine. It’s just ice, Sherlock.” “No, no,” Sherlock insists, “you’re dead. Doesn’t matter. Still love you.” When Molly arrives, she takes one look and says, “Oh, John,” crossing the room to wrap him in a hug. He presses his face into her blouse and shudders as he inhales and doesn’t cry, doesn’t cry.

*

Sherlock’s awake and lucid, but he won’t meet John’s or Mycroft’s eyes. That’s as clear a sign as any that he’s on the mend, John thinks wryly.

“Took a bit of a tumble, did you?” John tries.

“Nothing significant,” Sherlock says. His voice is raw from tubes and coughing.

John makes a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat. “Even though you were high?”

“Irrelevant.”

“Right.” John rubs the heels of his hands over his eyes.

Mycroft says, “Very relevant, in fact. You’re going to rehab.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” Sherlock rasps.

“You are going. To rehab,” Mycroft insists. He’s sitting near the window, one leg crossed elegantly over the other. His umbrella rests against his chair.

“I am not, and if you force me to, I assure you that you will regret it.”

“I will not be threatened by you, Sherlock.”

“Certainly not. You prefer to make the threats.”

Mycroft’s right eye twitches. John wonders if he’s aware of it. “I am not making threats,” Mycroft says, “I am trying to save you from yourself, which is, as ever, futile.”

“As futile as saving yourself? Chelsea buns and laxatives don’t seem to agree with you,” Sherlock goads, then launches into a spasm of coughing. John holds up the box of tissues, but Sherlock ignores him.

“And yet I am not the one in the hospital bed,” Mycroft points out, tapping his foot.

Sherlock tilts his head. “Not yet, no.”

Mycroft takes a deep breath. “You are going to rehab, and that is final.”

“Mycroft,” Sherlock grumbles, “even if you ‘save’ me, you’re going to die.”

The Holmes brothers stare each other down. John has seen enough violent death at close quarters, thanks, so he blurts out, “I’ll go with him.”

Mycroft shakes his head. “John, that is noble of you, but I am well aware that you are not available—”

“No, it’s fine,” John assures him. “I’ll take a leave of absence.”

“And the future Mrs. Watson?” Mycroft asks with a skeptical lift of an eyebrow.

John hopes his expression strikes the right balance between indifference and “I will fucking end you.” “Will also be Dr. Watson, actually, and she’s understanding,” he answers.

Mycroft tilts his head and murmurs, “How nice for you.”

 _I will fucking end you,_ John thinks.

“Geniuses, the pair of you,” Sherlock says, “but you’ve failed to take into account that I am not going to bloody rehab.”

“Fine. We won’t go to rehab,” John agrees, “we’ll go to Cornwall. If, God help you, you manage to find a supplier out there, I’ll kill you myself and throw the evidence into the sea. Close enough to rehab, Mycroft?”

“Given Sherlock’s resistance to a credible program, it will suffice,” Mycroft concedes.

“Lovely. If you would be so kind as to piss off, then,” Sherlock snaps.

Mycroft grimaces. “John. Sherlock,” he says, inclining his head at each one of them in turn. He picks up his umbrella and saunters from the room at his one and only pace, implacable as ever.

Sherlock’s stare is abyssal. “You intend to stay the whole time.”

“Yes,” John says.

“With me.”

“Yes.”

“John, I—don’t do this out of pity.”

Don’t make me say it, John thinks, and says, “You know that’s not why.”

Sherlock nods. “I’ll be horrible,” he warns.

“I’ll take my chances.”

“You aren’t worried about withdrawal?”

John shakes his head. “Oh, no. You’ll still be on buprenorphine.”

Sherlock frowns. “I’m sure I don’t plan on—”

“Buprenorphine,” John says, shortly.

Sherlock collapses back against his pillow and mutters, “I despise you.”

“You’re allowed,” John concedes. “Now get some sleep.”

* 

The future Dr. Watson is, indeed, understanding, but she has her limits. John seems to have found one of them; she’s wearing her “you aren’t keeping that gun in this flat” expression. Shit.

“I don’t like it, John,” Cynthia says. She’s soaking in the bath, bubbles enveloping her. The room is warm and humid and smells of flowers.

John perches on the edge of the tub. “He needs me,” he says. “Please. Please let me give him these few weeks.”

“It’s not a ‘few weeks,’ it’s two months. You’ll be back just a couple of weeks before the wedding,” Cynthia protests. They haven’t anything complicated planned—a small ceremony with the registrar and their family and close friends, and then dinner at an Indian restaurant—but John can see why she wants him around beforehand.

“I know, the timing isn’t ideal,” he agrees. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I just… I can’t leave him.”

Cynthia stirs. Sheets of foam rise and fall with the water beneath them. “And if I ask you to choose between going to Cornwall and getting married?” she asks.

“Cynthia—”

She shakes her head and says, “I’m not asking that of you, John. I just want to know where I stand.”

John remembers an ice cube cold between his fingertips and says, “I’d go.”

“All right.” She nods. Her mouth is tight. “Go, then.”

*

i.  
Their rental cottage is beautiful. Its contemporary furnishings blend with the rustic building, making the space feel at once chic and cosy. The kitchen is so small that John can barely navigate it without knocking anything over, but he doesn’t mind. It opens onto a spacious sitting room, which opens onto a screened-in porch. The bedroom has a stunning view of the cliffs and the sea beyond them. Sherlock, naturally, claims the bed nearest the windows; John takes some consolation in the fact that Sherlock is too tall for full sized mattresses, anyway.

ii.  
Tredannick Wollas, the village closest to the cottage, is in the middle of absolute nowhere. It’s a twenty-minute walk away, and its single paved road boasts two pubs, a post office, a chemist’s, and a grocer’s. John is on friendly terms with all of the locals they have met. Sherlock isn’t. He has managed to avoid actively antagonizing anyone, to John’s astonishment, but he ignores the locals’ friendly overtures. John apologizes for Sherlock’s standoffish behavior, not realising until he does it how much he’s missed doing it. It leaves him feeling like an agent of balance. Needed.

iii.  
Most days, John walks the cliffs with Sherlock, reveling in the salty, mineral-scented air. Sherlock can’t go far, at first, but he regains his endurance faster than John anticipated. They explore mile after mile of rocky hills, Sherlock waxing rhapsodic about the plants and animals they encounter and John pocketing small stones that appeal to him. In the evenings, John reads (the Wilkie Collins novel he finally, finally has time for) and writes (old cases that Sherlock has finally, finally given him permission to cover) while Sherlock composes on his violin. John accepts now that his writing will always be about their cases, which are, for John, about Sherlock. He privately considers Sherlock to be his muse, though for no price and under no circumstances will he ever tell him.

iv.  
John catches a late summer cold and spends a week in bed coughing and congested and feverish. He knows that there’s nothing significant about his illness, but he still feels wretched. To John’s shock, Sherlock walks to the village and brings him tea and honey and lemon and paracetamol and tissues (the kind with lotion in them, no less). When John laments that he wants to know what happens next in his book, but he feels too ill to read, Sherlock reads to him. Granted, he complains about the “ludicrous” plot, “insipid” narrator, and “lurid” prose, but still: he reads to John. John warns him against getting too close, as the last thing Sherlock needs right now is another respiratory threat, but Sherlock doesn’t stay away, and he doesn’t get sick.

v.  
John phones Cynthia a few times a week, pacing on the back porch and looking out at the caps of the waves. Phrases like “you vote with your feet” figure prominently in her side of their conversations; phrases like “you told me I could do this” figure prominently in his. He invites her to come out for a weekend, but she says she can’t spare the time away from London. He can’t shake the sense that they’re having the same talk every time: that it isn’t going anywhere, and neither are they. 

vi.  
Sherlock doesn’t look for cocaine, but he does find something worse: a case. A man in the village dies without apparent cause or explanation, a nightmarish expression frozen on his face. The villagers ask Sherlock to help once they realise (with an ever-so-subtle nudge from Sherlock, who’d been eavesdropping at the chemist’s, the nosy git) that he is that Sherlock Holmes. John tries to convince him to stay out of it, but he’d as well try to convince the tide not to come in. He follows Sherlock to the crime scene, trying to keep his disapproving expression intact even as excitement builds in his chest.

vii.  
The Lestrades visit for a week. They stay down one of the pubs in town (The Mermaid’s Crown); each day, John and Sherlock meet them for lunch and a walk. Tabba and Jude, looking alarmingly older (can it have been that long since John last saw them? He feels so very old around young people), take photo after photo of themselves and each other with their phones. Greg tells Sherlock that he’s bloody lucky that John is out here with him, because he, Greg, would let Sherlock fend for himself, were he in John’s shoes. No one believes him. Molly asks John about his wedding plans. John answers politely, but vaguely. They feel surreal to him, truth be told.


	5. September

When the knock sounds, John is writing at the desk in the corner of the sitting room. Sherlock is draped across the sofa; he has three nicotine patches on his arm, and he’s gazing at the ceiling, hands steepled beneath his jaw.

John grunts to his feet and answers the door. Cynthia stands on the steps in a flowing sundress, purse slung over one shoulder.

“John,” she says through a small smile.

John is momentarily frozen. Then his brain, such as it is, shudders back online, and he smiles in return. “Hey there,” he says, drawing her in for a hug and a kiss. She’s warm. She smells like their home. “I’m surprised, Cyn.”

“I know you’re almost due to come back, but I really wanted to see you, so I got a room at the… Mermaid’s Crown, I think it is? Thought we might have lunch,” she says.

“Sure,” John agrees, scrambling. “C’mon in. Give me a minute to get sorted and we’ll be off.”

He gestures to the armchair, and Cynthia takes a seat. Sherlock has righted himself and is staring at Cynthia as though she crashed in through the roof.

“Good to see you again, Mr. Holmes,” Cynthia says wryly.

On his way into the bedroom for his wallet, John sees the monologue waiting to fall out of Sherlock’s mouth. He thinks, _Don’t. Please. Just this once, Sherlock, just… don’t._

“Dr. Miller. A pleasure, as always,” Sherlock says.

John is fiercely proud.

Tucking his wallet into his back pocket, John toes his shoes on at the front door and asks, “Need anything from the village, Sherlock?”

Sherlock shakes his head and looks away, but before he does, John sees the hurt on his face. _That’s it,_ he thinks, something snapping in his chest. _Enough._ He doesn’t know what he’s going to say; he can’t think that far ahead. He does know that when he’s done, Sherlock won’t look like that. Can’t look like that.

John and Cynthia chat intermittently on their walk to the village. The sun is intense; a handful of clouds cast shifting shadows over the hills. Seabirds wheel and scream along the shore below.

“Well,” John comments when they arrive, “we have a choice between pub fare, or… pub fare.”

Cynthia half-smiles. “Pub fare will do.”

“Might I suggest The Scraggly Gull?”

“Lay on.”

John waves to the barkeep as he and Cynthia seat themselves. They each order fish and chips; the barkeep brings John a pint of lager without John having to ask.

They talk, though they choose subjects of no consequence. John feels compressed under the weight of what neither of them will say. He wonders, if they pretend that nothing is wrong, if they can continue like this: civil, stilted, unreachable.

When they’ve reduced the fish and chips to crumbs and greasy newsprint in plastic baskets, Cynthia clears her throat. “John,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to tell you in person, it didn’t seem right to—I’m moving back in with Sally. We’re going to give it another try. We—I slept with her last weekend,” she says to the tabletop, then looks up to gauge John’s reaction.

John lets out something between a hiss and a sigh. “Of course you did.”

“I just—the way you acted, leaving like that—”

“Wait, are you saying that it’s my fault that you cheated on me? Because that is the most bullshit accusation I have ever—”

“It _is_ your fault, John. It’s too much, what you did. What you’re doing.” Cynthia casts a sidelong glance at the barkeep, who is drying glasses and seems to be pretending not to hear them. “Asking me to wait for you while you put him first. The same way it would have been too much for you if I’d asked you not to come here, but I wasn’t selfish enough to do that.”

John blinks. “I’m sorry, did you just call me selfish?”

“Yes, John,” says Cynthia. “Your behavior is selfish.”

“You chose to sleep with her! That is not my fault, that is your fault, and it was bloody selfish!,” John explodes.

Cynthia keeps her composure. John thinks of it as her therapist-calm. “Don’t yell at me, John.”

“I am not ‘yelling!’”

“I don’t think we should have this conversation while you’re this upset,” she murmurs.

“I don’t think we should have this conversation at all, because I don’t think you should have slept with Sally fucking Donovan!” The glass clatters when John slams his hand against the table. Now the barkeep is looking at him; John knows that look well from his younger, angrier days. It’s the prelude to a tossing-out.

With effort, he takes a deep breath and gets control of his temper. “That’s not the same as what I have with Sherlock, and you know it,” he spits.

Cynthia shakes her head at him. Looking at once sorrowful and angry, she asks him, “He’s the only person who’s real to you, isn’t he?”

John stands so abruptly that his chair topples behind him. Ignoring the barkeep’s protests, he throws a couple of notes onto the table and strides out of the pub, his mind a blank fury. He leaves the town behind, cutting across the hills until, panting and soaked with sweat, he comes to the tallest cliffs. 

He throws rocks into the water, one after another. None of them make a large enough impact to satisfy him.

He screams: obscenities, inchoate sounds, anything. Ella suggested that he try this years ago, but he never found a place in London where no one would hear him. Now he lets go, shouting until his throat is raw.

He quiets. He stares out over the water. Slowly, layer by uncomfortable layer, it sinks into his awareness that he’s been somewhat of an arsehole. Kind of a lot of an arsehole, really.

He sprawls out on the sparse grass. Stomach churning, he texts Harry; as much as John doesn’t like to admit it, Harry is John’s best reality check.

_Think I may be an arsehole._

Harry’s answer comes right away: _No shit. What’d you do now?_

_Nothing special. Got time for a question?_

_Shoot. (Figuratively. Ha.)_

_Think I’d be completely mental to move in with Sherlock?_

_Nope._

_Even though I don’t know what we are?_

_If you honestly don’t know that, John-Boy, then you really are the stupid half._

_Tosser._

_Arsehole._

_Twat._

_Not since the surgery._

_Oof. Walked into that one._

_Stop texting me. Go fix what you broke._

_Thanks, Hare._

_Yeah, yeah._

Aching and exhausted, John hauls himself back to the village as the setting sun burns the horizon. He finds Cynthia in the common room at The Mermaid’s Crown, reading a novel at one end of the sofa. She looks up when he comes in and nods, but she says nothing; he takes a seat on the sofa’s empty side.

“I’m sorry for how I acted,” John says, quietly. “Tonight, and since Sherlock got sick.”

Cynthia sighs and marks her place in her book, cradling it in her lap. “Apology accepted. I’m sorry for what I said about you at the end.”

“’S’all right. I deserved it.”

“And I’m sorry that I cheated on you. I should have broken things off with you before I slept with her.” She sighs again. “You and I are ridiculous.”

“How’s that?”

“We had to run away from our bloody-minded egotists and cock up our lives to accept that what we really want is our bloody-minded egotists,” Cynthia says. She sounds so, so tired. John feels bad for her.

He nods. “I did want this to work,” he says. That seems important, somehow.

“I know. I did, too.” Cynthia stands, and John follows suit. “I’m spent,” she announces. “Going to turn in early.”

“Sleep well. Safe travels,” John says.

Cynthia hugs him and kisses him on the cheek. “You, too. I’ll be in touch when you’re back in London. Take care, John.”

He doesn’t have to force his smile. “You, too.”

He drags himself through the dusk. When he arrives at the cottage, Sherlock, who is still sprawled on the sofa but has changed into his robe, gives him a questioning look. “Yes, we broke up,” John confirms, making a beeline for the bedroom. He can see that Sherlock wants to talk, but John can’t be arsed just now. He collapses onto his bed without undressing or turning the covers down. He is asleep in less than a minute.

*

“John. John! Wake up,” Sherlock says, shaking him.

John groans. It’s bright in the room, but not so bright that he thinks he’s slept in.

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know, half six? Quarter to seven? What the devil does it matter? There’s another corpse, John! Same manner of death as the first. It’s brilliant, get up, get up!” He’s already dressed, and he sounds positively gleeful.

John glares as best he can, given that his eyes are barely open. “Sherlock, handle your own ruddy crime scene. I really, really need to sleep.”

John doesn’t need to see Sherlock’s withering stare to feel it. “You have gotten old, John,” he gripes.

“Yeah, if the grey hair and the spare tyre didn’t tip you off, I really don’t know what to tell you. Goodnight,” John says firmly, turning onto his side and dragging the covers over his head.

Sherlock sighs a martyred sigh and leaves in a puff of dissatisfaction, though he closes the bedroom curtains on his way out. John smiles and falls back asleep.

When John wakes up again, this time of his own accord, it’s half nine and beautiful outside. He showers, dresses, and is halfway through breakfast when Sherlock bursts in, bouncing with every step. Sherlock tosses a bag of microwave popcorn onto the table (there’s no plastic wrap around the bag, which John thinks is unusual), grabs the dry toast from John’s plate, and devours it while he paces the sitting room.

Sherlock wipes the crumbs from his lips with the back of his hand. Then he grins in a way that makes John a little nervous and says, “How do you feel about an experiment?”

“What?”

“I know who killed those people,” Sherlock says, eyes ablaze, “and I think I know how, but I have to test my theory. You can leave before I do so, if you’d rather. Could be dangerous.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” John says, finishing the last of the bacon.

Sherlock’s grin widens. “John,” he says, “it’s time to make some popcorn.”

Sherlock drops the packet into the microwave, then starts it going with a flourish. He flops out on the sofa as though already impatient for his results.

Five seconds later, John can’t inhale without pain. Ten seconds later, he can scarcely inhale at all. He feels as though the pressure in the room has changed, that his head is being crushed and his sight distorted. His limbs feel impossibly heavy. His gut is clenching as though he is in the throes of a panic attack; he feels on the verge of meeting some great evil.

He is certain that he is about to die.

He stops fighting.

He falls from his chair. He sees the rocks he collected from the cliffs arranged on the sitting room coffee table. He sees the novel he managed to finish reading this summer. He sees Sherlock slumped on the sofa, unmoving, his eyes wide with terror.

John thinks, _No._

John did not, he absolutely _did not,_ descend into the hell that was the hospital and drag Sherlock back to life to let him die frightened in a fucking cottage from fucking fumes twenty minutes from Tredannick fucking Wollas. _Fuck_ that.

Slowly, every muscle in agony, John forces himself to his feet. He wraps his arms around Sherlock and lifts him into a fireman’s carry, then staggers to the front door and—he can’t grab the handle, he’s too weak, he can’t do it until he does—swings it open and collapses on the lawn.

The microwave beeps.

They crawl away from the house and lie down, panting. John feels out of pain after a few deep breaths. He tenses his muscles experimentally. They ache, but only a little.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock coughs, “I’m so sorry. The murder weapon, the drug, is in the popcorn. It’s activated by microwaves. I gravely underestimated the speed at which its toxicity would manifest.” 

“Yeah, you did,” John rasps. “Still. Nowhere I’d rather be.” He can’t sit up yet, but he’s elated to be alive, to be here in the cool and dewy grass, to have cheated death with Sherlock one more time. He has a suspicion that the endorphins will wear off later and he’ll feel the full horror of what just happened, but for the moment, he feels fantastic.

John works his mobile from his pocket and dials 999, then reaches to brush dirt and curls from Sherlock’s forehead. Their faces are scraped and muddied where they hit the ground. Sherlock stares at John, his expression unguarded. When the first responders find them, neither man has moved; they are on their sides, not quite an arm’s length apart, their attention on each other.

*

The fumes are filling the room again, he is watching Sherlock suffocate again, but this time, he can’t move, he can’t help, and Sherlock is dying in front of him. Sherlock has tubes down his throat and in his arms, but they won’t save him, and it is John’s fault, John’s fault, John’s fault—

He wakes himself up screaming, then yells a second time when he sees the silhouette hovering over him.

“John,” Sherlock murmurs, “John, calm down, it’s me.”

John pants for a few moments, lost to terror, before he closes his eyes and sighs, “Christ.”

Sherlock’s sitting on the edge of John’s bed—now that he thinks about it, John can feel the dip in the mattress—and holding John’s hand. “Your breathing was erratic and your heart rate was elevated,” Sherlock says, running one thumb over John’s knuckles. “Your eyelids were active. All of these signs are characteristic of the REM stage of sleep, the phase during which dreaming occurs. Given the stressful events of the morning and your irrational tendency to feel responsible for creating positive outcomes in situations that you cannot possibly control, which, really, John, you ought to have abandoned by this late stage in your development, I anticipated that you would have nightmares instead of dreams. I decided that I would wait here during each of your REM phases in case you woke up.”

John pulls his hand free from Sherlock’s and drags himself to a sit. He feels trapped by the covers, so he kicks them off and leans against the headboard with his legs straight in front of him. He didn’t absorb many of Sherlock’s words; his mind is still blank and fear-bright. You’re here, he thinks in an effort to center himself, this is now, you’re here, Sherlock’s safe, you’re here.

Sherlock frowns as he scoots fully onto the bed, sitting cross-legged to John’s left. “You hardly heard me, did you,” Sherlock says, not bothering to make it a question. “John, honestly, I find your constitution so emotional as to be utterly inscrutable.”

 _Christ,_ John thinks. Of course Sherlock cares about John enough to watch him sleep, enough to wait up to soothe him after a nightmare, and of course he fails to grasp that criticising John once he does wake up is not, in fact, soothing.

“You could stop scrutinising me,” John suggests pointedly.

Sherlock lifts one hand and rests it along the side of John’s face, brushing his thumb over the curve of John’s cheek. John stills, though his heartbeat picks up. “No,” Sherlock counters, his voice so soft that John can barely hear it, “I really don’t think that I could.” He lets his hand fall. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that you’d come back?”

John laces the fingers of his left hand through those of Sherlock’s right. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Come to Sussex, I mean,” Sherlock says.

“If that’s what you want, yes.”

“Of course that’s what I want. Don’t be stupid.”

John raises an eyebrow at Sherlock, who has enough sense to look abashed. “It’s what I want, too. I—last year,” John says, “when you asked me to come with you, I didn’t know who I was without you. I know, now.”

“And?”

“I’m _half._ ”

Sherlock beams. “Excellent deduction, John, though labouriously arrived at even by your abysmal standards.”

“Still a charmer,” John grumbles. “Listen, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

“Mmm?”

“That night at Baker Street when—the night you, uh. Your violin.”

“Mmm,” Sherlock acknowledges, tensing.

“When I went to close the window, there were, there were pieces, I didn’t see them. Some of them cut my foot pretty badly, actually. Puncture wound and multiple splinters.”

“That was why you were limping,” Sherlock says. “I suspected as much. I was furious that you wouldn’t tell me.”

“I cleaned it out, but I—” He’s never told Sherlock; he’s never told anyone. Now that it comes to it, John’s finding himself embarrassed. “I. Um. I left the splinters in, the small ones. On purpose. So I’d heal around them.”

Sherlock blinks, twice, then leaps up with a burst of the frenetic energy John associates with his being on a case and crouches at John’s feet. “This one,” he says, lifting the right foot (much the way he would a corpse’s, John thinks, and he is on entirely the wrong side of fifty to feel comfortable with that parallel).

“Yes.”

“You left pieces of my violin in your body.”

“Yes.”

“And they’re still there. Here,” Sherlock says, running his fingertips over the ridges of John’s scars.

“Yes, Sherlock, Jesus, you’re the bloody detective,” John complains.

Sherlock unfolds in one fluid motion that John doesn’t quite follow, but it ends with Sherlock hugging John to him and burying his face in John’s hair. “John,” Sherlock whispers. “ _My_ John.”

“Yes,” John agrees, resting one hand in the curve between Sherlock’s neck and shoulder.

Long moments later, Sherlock sighs and lets go, then settles into his own bed. John considers asking him to come back, but given Sherlock’s—well, given _Sherlock,_ full stop, John decides to wait until he knows for certain whether Sherlock is even interested. John is interested, absolutely, but he can accept any answer: it’s intimacy with Sherlock, not sex, that he can’t live without.

His scalp feels damp when he nestles his head against his pillow. Not until he’s on the verge of going under does he realise that Sherlock had been in tears.

*

The black SUV out front smacks of Mycroft. For neither the first nor, he suspects, the last time, John finds himself loading all of their luggage into the boot. 

“Christ, Sherlock, what’s in here?” John demands, hefting a small yet heavy case.

“Nothing,” Sherlock insists.

“Feels like bloody boulders.”

Sherlock shrugs as he steps into the backseat. “I may have found myself reluctant to part with your rock collection,” he admits.

John shuts the boot, shaking his head.

“You held onto a bunch of rocks, yet I hear you decided to let a killer go,” Anthea says from the driver’s seat as John sidles in after Sherlock. “Truly, Sherlock, you are a force for justice.”

Sherlock’s sulk is nearly palpable.

“‘Morning, Anthea,” John grins.

“John,” Anthea nods. “Mycroft took the liberty of having your things relocated to Sussex.” She scrolls on her phone, staring down at the screen without any apparent interest. “Oh, and the clinic knows you won’t be working anymore. They wish you the best.”

Mycroft is a mysterious bastard, but a useful one, John reflects. “Thank you,” he says.

Anthea nods at John, docks her phone, and starts the engine. The tires send up dust from the country road. John looks over to see if Sherlock is still brooding and catches him mid-stare; Sherlock notices and pretends to be looking out the window.

John smiles.


End file.
